Broadcast television faces tough and varying competition with various media distribution systems, from the Internet to direct express mail. In 2009, the United States transitioned terrestrial broadcast television from analog to digital, with the Advanced Television Systems Committee (“ATSC”) standard finally supplanting the National Television Systems Committee (“NTSC”) standard after a decade-long delay with respect to the initial roll-out plan. Observing some of the shortcomings of ATSC A/53 signal reception, and recognizing even tougher competition from emerging media distribution systems, such as, for example, applications on new “smart phones,” the ATSC solicited proposals in 2007 for a backwards-compatible modification to the ATSC A/53 signal that could robustly deliver multiple media services to mobile and handheld devices, while at the same time providing for uninterrupted main-service delivery. The result is the ATSC A/153 standard, ratified in 2009, now a Published Standard in 2011. The ATSC A/153 standard, “A/153: ATSC Mobile DTV Standard, Parts 1-8,” is available at
http://www.atsc.org/cms/index.php/standards/published-standards/163-a153-atsc-mobile-dtv-standard-parts-1-8
in eight parts, currently an interim, or pre-publication version, with latest revision Oct. 15, 2009.
The ATSC-M/H service shares the same radio frequency (“RF”) broadcast as the main service ATSC signal. The main service ATSC signal is described in “ATSC A/53, Digital Television Standard. Parts 1-6,” available at http://atsc.org/cms/index.php/standards/published-standards. The main service ATSC signal delivers about 19.4 Mbps, and the ATSC-M/H uses up to about 38% of this total bandwidth. The ATSC-M/H data is partitioned into ensembles, each of which contains one or more services. Each ensemble uses a distinct Reed-Solomon frame in the forward-error-correction coding, so that each ensemble can be coded to a different level of error protection, depending on the intended use. Thus the RS frame is the basic data delivery unit of ATSC-M/H data, which is IP-encapsulated, and an ATSC-M/H service consists of a package of IP streams. In contrast to this IP packaging, main service A/53 data is an MPEG-2 transport stream.
The fast information channel (“FIC”) is a separate data channel from the IP-encapsulated ATSC-M/H service data delivered through RS frames, carrying essential information, for rapid ATSC-M/H Service information, such as binding information between ATSC-M/H services and the ATSC-M/H ensembles carrying them, as well as version information for the ATSC-M/H service signaling channel of each ATSC-M/H ensemble. The FIC data is not IP-encapsulated. Furthermore, the ATSC-A/153 standard supports transport means other than IP encapsulation, by means of system configuration signaling, to enable future development of the ATSC-M/H system.